The first dream ever dreamt was a dream of America. Rome, pyramids, practice. The ribbon hemming the present together, the gift, loosely untied, loosely wrapped around cardboard made of broken promise trimming. The ribbon, of rib and forgotten apple stems, the semen still spinning inside of it. This is how you birth a nation, I suppose. By raping it. By untying the threads. Taking the tidy and tearing, tearing, tearing. How does one build a dream?
You start with a brick, or a dream of one. Maybe a pipe, full of dirty water, of dirty white. Someone should carry this brick. Maybe in their stomach or on their back, across customs, across shores. We will attach this brick to a person, one may say. Indentured servant is too free, there is too much liberation in that. Someone will decide to tie the brick to a slave. Whom to pay for the building of such a brick then? A building is an accumulation of bricks, of bodies toiling away, sweat down fatty arms, dying of thirst, of hearse heat and other intangibles. Weigh the cost of a vision, of a field of cotton…how much for a whip, you may ask? Is this an idea or dream? Interchangeable, as different as iced chains and crosses are to linked chains and church crosses. Hoist a flag or a nigger, a never and a noose. These ideas we hold to be self-evident, self-Oedipal, motherfucking it all away. When I was a boy, my first dreams of cum and pee stains incorporated a corpus, a corpse thrown down and away by the bloating of its deceasing. How can you tabulate that appropriately? How many marches and songs can you write for the fake slaying of a dragon? When Trump became 45, a number, a thing to be mocked, to be hung from the trailer park walls, the Ann Coulter fan club doors, I had no tears. I still do not. The tears turned lava turned words turned stories turned stones in graves, perturbed dead grandmothers soothing knees and womb before tubs of Epsom, tubs of chitlins, tales of Tubman. Tussling with greens, with ancestor juju jumping, jubilee and Juneteenth be damned.
This dream, this could be a fire, or a furnace holding one, fuming, flaming a candle, a poem, a play; the ideas behind a revolution can be many a thing, but idle they cannot be. This dream can be of music, of welfare recipients dancing to the swipe of a card, could be the death of a trumpet, the siren blow of the last of a kin blowing hard bits nicotine parliament from an ashen frame settling into the newness…
